It's Probably a Good Day to Rake Leaves

I’m taking a breather of sorts today. There’s plenty of news and commentary out there, but most of it is fairly marginal. So it’s a light read. 

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If you absolutely must keep engaged on health policy, it’s worth looking over some of the earnings coverage from this week. There’s not a ton on actual policy, but it’s good context for understanding where the industry is going. 

Pfizer received a lot of the attention yesterday for the way that its COVID franchise has rebounded. Today’s discussion will focus on Lilly’s lighter-than-expected GLP-1 sales, which seem to be related to wholesaler dynamics, not any hiccup in demand. 

Biogen’s results suggest that Alzheimer’s treatment is growing faster than anticipated, while AbbVie’s numbers have Humira eroding (slightly) quicker than folks thought. 

In isolation, all of those nuggets are just trivia, explaining why earnings did (or did not) make the market happy. But they’re also seeds of future trends. So they’re working keeping an eye on. 

(There have also been some interesting health-policy mentions on the earnings calls. I’ll have more on those tomorrow and next week …)

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What else? 

This story about Liz Warren asking the FTC to keep a closer eye on drug wholesalers buying oncology practices is interesting. It seems pretty clear that vertical integration in health care has not delivered for patients, but it also feels like the toothpaste is out of the tube. Open to theories on how this all gets unwound. 

There’s also a Reuters article on $35 insulin, posing the questions of who has access to the $35 price (Medicare beneficiaries) and what is happening to everyone else. In theory, that could be a really impactful story, telling the tale of how a legitimate public health issue has -- through a thousand small steps -- largely been solved, but Reuters never quite connects the dots, even though it seems to have all the right facts. 

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Beyond that, eh. 

Everyone seems pretty distracted by politics, unsurprisingly. And pretty much all of the political reporting right now on health/pharma is either a retread of well-established (and generally skeletal) policy proposals or overblown analyses. I’m reading it all, but it’s not improving my life or my knowledge base. 

So it’s not a bad week to unplug from the news, carve some pumpkins, rake some leaves, give the fireplace a test run. Winter is coming.